Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• More META More Money 🤑⬆️

• Snapchat’s Earnings Still Haunted 👻

• Asteroids ☄️

• ToolBox Thursdays ⚒️

More META More Money 🤑⬆️

Zuck was jumping on his sofa yesterday (obviously his “virtual sofa” in the metaverse) after Meta’s impressive earnings call yesterday.

As for all the numbers you need to know for META, here ya go:

1. Total Revenue: $32 Billion (+11%)

2. Net Income: $7.7 Billion (+16%)

3. Ad Revenue: $31.5 Billion (+12%)

4. Other Revenue: $225 Million (+3%)

As you can see, Meta logged its first double-digit revenue growth since 2021, making the previous lackluster quarters feel like a bad dream.

Their Family of Apps (FB, IG, WhatsApp and now Threads) reached 3.88B monthly active people this quarter which is literally like half the world population!

Meta also isn't just attracting more guests to its party, it's getting them to chip in for the pizza. The average revenue per user has also been going up.

Investors are reacting like fans at a rock concert, sending Meta's stock up another 5% after a whopping 139% rally this year.

Broadening our lens a bit, the strong performances from Meta and Alphabet might be signaling a sunnier horizon for the advertising market.

Snapchat’s Earnings Still Haunted 👻

The advertising market might be signaling a sunnier horizon but not for at least one social media player.

It seems like the ad market is still gloom and doom for Snapchat.

Snap reported its earnings this week and let’s just say, it’s having a bit of a rough patch.

They've been caught sliding down the revenue slide for the second time in a row with sales slipping 4% this quarter to a modest $1.1 billion which led to a stock landslide.

Their CEO also wasn’t too glee about the near future forecast with revenue for next quarter being flat or even decreasing by up to 5%. Ouch!

However, Snapchatters/Snappies (what do they call themselves?) are not giving up and planning multiple things to make sure their stories ARE the only thing that vanish, NOT their revenue.

1/ Ad Platform Resurrection

Snap had made some significant changes to their advertising platform in lieu of Apple’s privacy-policy changes which didn't perform as expected.

It led to a lot of advertisers ghosting the ghost emoji company. Oh, the irony!

However, the company says that they’ve woo’ed a lot of the advertisers back and should see some dough raking in.

2/ Snapchat+

Evan Spielberg also launched a $3.99/month Snapchat+ service which has reportedly gained over 4M users.

3/ AI

It’s 2023 folks. How can any company, let alone a tech company, not have AI on their agenda to boost their profits.

Snap is no different as it’s trying out sponsored ads within its AI chatbot as well as training heavier and powerful models for better targeted ads.

But the uphill battle doesn't end there. For a smaller social media player, Snapchat often gets seated at the kids' table when it comes to advertisers' priority.

With rivals like TikTok swinging their user growth stats like a shiny new toy, the competition is getting intense.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Samsung extends cut in memory chip production, will focus on high-end AI chips instead. After a big loss in its memory chip unit, it's cutting production but betting on high-performance chips like HBM to brighten the future. 🎢📱 

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and TomTom are joining forces to challenge Google and Apple Maps. They've released a massive dataset for developers to create their own mapping apps.📍🗺️

Tesla is under investigation! The California AG is investigating safety and marketing concerns with Autopilot. With issues like "phantom braking" popping up, it's a bumpy ride for Elon. 🚘💡

⚒️ ToolBox Thursdays ⚒️

WASK - Get more customers with next generation ads

Superhuman - The Fastest Email Experience Ever Made

Asqme - Convert your content into an interactive, AI-powered chatbot

MindStudio - Launch Powerful AI Apps in minutes

SumUp - Summarise any article and gives relevant references

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